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Friday, April 13, 2012

Initial Impressions of Qwiki Creator

Last month I learned that Qwiki was launching a creation tool that allows users to create their own multimedia Qwikis. A Qwiki is a short narrated story that includes images, videos, and text. This morning I received my invitation to try out the new Qwiki Creator, these are my initial impressions.

Creating the basics of a Qwiki is very easy. There are three steps to the process; uploading content (or linking to hosted content like a Flickr image), recording narration, and captioning content. One of the things that I learned in my first attempt at creating a Qwiki is that the order in which you upload content is the order in which it will appear in your Qwiki. Perhaps I overlooked it, but I couldn't find a way to reorder my uploads. Voice recordings are limited to 20 seconds. You can also record with your webcam and have a video of yourself appear in your Qwiki. Captioning your content is very straight forward. After uploading content and making your recordings you're presented with a grid of all of your content to caption. Just fill in the blanks in the caption fields. The caption screen is where you can insert links.

The Qwiki Creator browser bookmarklet, titled Qwik It!, is a handy little product that will help some students clip and organize content for their Qwiki projects. With Qwik It! installed students can clip sections of webpages and send them directly to their Qwiki Creator accounts. From there they can use the clipped content to build a Qwiki.

Applications for Education
I was hoping for a bit more from the Qwiki Creator, but despite some of its editing limitations it could be a good tool for students to use to create short multimedia stories. Students could create personal narratives using Qwiki Creator. Or you might have students create short introductory narratives about topics that they're studying in your classes.

If you want to see my first attempt at creating a Qwiki, you can watch it below.